#19 Snigdha Sur, Founder & CEO of The Juggernaut
On building a modern media company for South Asian storytelling
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Hot off the Pod 🎙️ Snigdha Sur: Founder & CEO of The Juggernaut
This week, I welcomed Snigdha Sur, Founder and CEO of The Juggernaut to the pod. The Juggernaut is a subscription media company and community that produces deep-dive reporting on South Asia(ns).
A trailblazer with a passion for telling South Asian stories? Dare I say more?
Snigdha Sur began her career journey at McKinsey. She subsequently moved to India to pursue independent consulting for companies like Buzzfeed and Quartz and media investing. She also helped develop the launch strategy for Reese Witherspoon's media company, Hello Sunshine. What's more, Snigdha has ties to Bollywood, having worked in film production for Phantom Films. She is an alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School, and Y-Combinator. In this episode, I dive into Snigdha's journey to The Juggernaut — from its name down to the numbers. Dive into Snigdha's story for her secrets to success and a round of South Asian story-telling.
Excerpts from the pod below:
In 2021, we know niche media works. But that wasn’t quite as well understood in 2018. How did you know a media company specific to South Asians would work?
It goes back to the math… and viewing yourself as the power user. South Asians in America have $560 billion of disposable income. $560 billion. That's only in the U.S.— we're not even talking about Canada and the U.K. And we're grossly underserved. And so that's a problem in terms of fundraising though, right? Being early. When Coinbase was raising in 2012, people thought they were crazy. They didn't get any funding because they were so early.
When we (The Juggernaut) graduated Y-Combinator, we were one of the few companies that had revenue and real customers. But it was so hard for me to raise — and we can talk about bias in fundraising in a second. But I also understand that they didn't believe in media. They hadn't seen it work because all their examples were BuzzFeed, Vice, etc. And I said, ‘Guys, verticalized media works.’ Think about it. I'm gonna make this up but even if there are only 100,000 golfers in America, and there's one golfing magazine, every one of those 100,000 — if they're aficionados — is going to subscribe to that magazine. Because that's the only option. That's how I viewed it. We can be winner-take-all. We will be the best journalistic outlet on the South Asian diaspora and the global South Asian population.
The solidarity of Indian celebrities around the current COVID crisis rings hollow and apolotical, compared to that of their diaspora counterparts. @sheikhimaan reports:The Juggernaut gets a lot of flack from Internet trolls and others. Maybe I'm biased, but it seems excessive, even compared to other publications I've seen. How do you deal with that?
Goodness. We can talk about mental health here, but yes, we do attract excessive trolling. It comes from both the left and the right which is kind of incredible. I've spoken to my mentors in the industry, like Mitra Kalita and other folks who've been a long way. They tell me, ‘You're doing something right if both sides hate you.’
We've been called both Hinduphobic, as well as Islamophobic. We've heard things like, ‘Why do you call it South Asia? You should just call it India.’ And well, the reason we call it South Asia is very specific. Personally, I have family that's grown up in Burma and Bangladesh. I’m belong to a Partition family. So when I think about South Asia, I actually think about all of those countries because technically, I don't even have an ancestor in India.
We're doing the best we can. If you really read our reporting, it is reporting. A lot of people forget what journalism is. Journalism isn't just supposed to tell you what an imagined future is. Unfortunately or fortunately, journalism is also supposed to reflect back the current reality.
Catch the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or here!
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